


Day 9: Telepathy

by fascinationex



Series: transformers fics by fascinationex [45]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Broken Interfacing Panels, Consent Issues, M/M, POV Outsider, Reckless Exhibitionism, Sticky Sexual Interfacing, Telepathy, megastarmas 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:55:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28494231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fascinationex/pseuds/fascinationex
Summary: Megatron had not even flinched when Prime had slammed his knee into his interfacing panel. The whole faction agreed that this was very impressive of him.
Relationships: Megatron/Starscream (Transformers), Soundwave/Suffering (one-sided)
Series: transformers fics by fascinationex [45]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1311599
Comments: 28
Kudos: 140





	Day 9: Telepathy

**Author's Note:**

> Note: fic contains consent issues around the 'reckless exhibitionism' thing

Megatron had not even flinched when Prime had slammed his knee into his interfacing panel. The whole faction agreed that this was very impressive of him. 

But the fact remained: his interfacing panel had crumpled completely on impact. Even _Prime’s_ optics had gone from deep sapphire to pale larimar blue at the sight of it—which had allowed Megatron the split second’s distraction he needed to ram his heavily-armoured helm into Optimus Prime’s face. 

Then he’d yanked the dangling remains of his panel free, discarded it, and continued on with his fight. 

Yes. 

Very impressive. 

The Decepticons were duly, flinchingly, impressed with their leader’s bravery, nerve and, uh, pain tolerance. 

The crumpled panel was now hiding in Scavenger’s subspace, and Scrapper was pretending he didn’t know, and Soundwave was pretending he didn’t know what _either_ of them knew. It wasn’t relevant. 

Soundwave was in the long habit of ignoring the irrelevancies he picked up from other Decepticons. He had a strict non-interference policy about his own faction. Half of them suspected he knew every thought they had, and confirming the extent of his skill with the communications subsystem was both strategically unwise and bad for morale. 

But what the Decepticons could all agree upon (he had gathered) was that an interfacing panel, once destroyed and then ripped clean off by its irate owner, really needed _immediate_ replacement. 

Interfacing panels existed to cover incredibly sensitive and, importantly, _very private_ hardware. 

Unfortunately, it was not a common injury. And they did not have all the _parts._

Megatron had taken it more or less in stride, at least outwardly. And, out of both courtesy and terror, everyone else was just doing their level best to, erm, ignore that Megatron’s armour was malfunctioning until the tiny, fiddly parts that kept such a panel closed were fabricated. 

The Constructicons had dropped all other projects to work on this one, so it wouldn’t take more than the cycle—and also, Soundwave knew, so they could all hide in the fabrication rooms and avoid having to actually see Megatron stomping around without his interfacing panel. 

Soundwave did not share this insight with anybody. They were doing their jobs. That they derived personal benefit was also not relevant. 

Usually an embarrassing injury like this would see the mechanism in question quietly resting in the medbay until the parts could be made, scavenged or repurposed from something else, except in emergencies. 

Megatron was not just any mechanism, though. The Autobots were, as ever, on the move. He did not have—he claimed—the ‘luxury’ of hiding away in the medbay. 

Soundwave was privy to greater than average insight here, from long familiarity if not from his monitoring of the comms services: Megatron, being of the mining caste and used to close, frequently very public quarters, considered modesty a luxury of squeamish higher castes and discarded it when it became inconvenient. 

Again, Soundwave did not share this insight with anybody else. Uncomfortable foot soldiers did not require insight into Megatron’s motives. 

However, all these events and motives intersected here, in the command centre, where Megatron sat ensconced on his throne. The lights gleamed from the huge, silvery expanse of his chest plates, from the thick breadth of his thighs. Shadows and highlights fell between his thighs, where his interfacing equipment was tucked back, glinting like buried treasure when he shifted position. 

It had been uncomfortable but fine when it was just Megatron with his panel open, quiescent equipment half on display for anyone who took the opportunity to glance toward it and pay attention. Everybody had. Soundwave was aware. 

But then Starscream arrived to report for his shift, which was where problems began to pile up. 

Starscream’s jet alt mode took him higher, more quietly, than most of the fliers in the Decepticon army. He arrived directly from a scouting run, which he occasionally took to cast his own delicate instruments over the land below and find what he could when the Nemesis's scans found only frustrating interference. 

Lazy processing made its way into the communications subsystem. Soundwave picked up… this and that, and the rank and file called this ‘telepathy’. From Megatron, he received only only occasional thoughts and stray moments of awareness. From others… plenty. 

Soundwave was used to the twin flutterings of admiration and resentment that rumbled nearly equally through the fields and airwaves when Starscream arrived. He carried off certain amount of drama just by showing up: in his frame, in his paint, in his manner. 

There was an unsurprising number of subordinates who indulged in brief, usually violent and intensely sexual, fantasies of his submission. Sometimes, those who had such fantasies cut them off abruptly in a distracting wash of mortification and glanced uncertainly in Soundwave's direction. 

Again, Soundwave never shared this information. He had worked with Starscream for millions of years. It seemed likely that the mechanism next to whom Starscream had first come online would also have been the first mechanism to fantasise about grinding his face into _something_. The list of those fantasising thus had surely just expanded from there. 

Fantasies, however violent, were irrelevant. 

Starscream himself had helped Soundwave brace for what came next. He rarely bothered with stealth around their own ship. He was a tiny cloud of indistinct, vicious little processes plotting quietly, carried along to the command centre on sharp, _click-click-click_ -ing thrusters. 

The mechanism nearest the doors thought Starscream smelled like the sky: oxygen and ozone and fresh wind with exotic organic things still trailing from his seams. Acid Storm, supposedly on security camera duty (to which he was attending with a tolerable degree of interest, mostly) had a sharp, annoyed thought that _he_ hadn't gotten free flight time this cycle, followed immediately by something lewd about the bright red of Starscream's pelvic armour, painted like a target. 

Megatron's attention shifted when he came in, too. There were no rerouted thoughts Soundwave could sense, but the change in his attention moved the landscape of other thoughts in the room. It was like a slow tectonic drift: those not subject to it relaxed, those closest to the entryway, where he now looked, tensed. 

There was a very warm, slightly aggressive throb that Soundwave knew without looking would match the exact moment his optics registered Starscream. 

Soundwave was, regrettably, used to that, too. 

He was _less_ used to the dull whirr of Megatron's spike pressurising into the relative quiet of the command centre. 

His fingers paused in their typing. All around him, tension and awkwardness rose. Isolated thoughts tripped into, and tumbled across, the communications subsystem and right into Soundwave’s processor: 

Dirge had no notion of where to look; Acid Rain thought, very clearly _I knew Starscream was fragging him_ ; the guard by the door took one glance over his shoulder, thinking _is that his spi—yes, that's his spike_ , and then turned determinedly towards the corridor with no further thoughts in his processor at all. 

_Frag me, that's huge,_ thought someone. Someone... Skywarp, Soundwave thought. Of course Skywarp. 

Starscream's cacophonous and yet indecipherable mind spat out a sharp sense of pleasure, accomplishment and blistering interest, and the single, crystal clear, possessive thought: _I always did like to sit in the command chair_. 

"Report," said Megatron. There was nothing like embarrassment from him. Soundwave would not dig to see if he could find any—it wasn't any of his business, and he didn't expect to find it anyway. 

"Lord Megatron," said Starscream, somewhere between rasping and screeching, as was his way. He sounded somehow satisfied. 

Soundwave resumed typing. He couldn't even see Megatron from where he was standing, as his back was to the command seat, but he was well flooded with everyone else's perceptions—many, _many_ of which centred on Megatron's spike. 

He'd never personally seen it erect. And for the most part Starscream and Megatron enjoyed (for a value of _enjoyment_ that, again, Soundwave felt was not his business) a relatively monogamous relationship. Starscream's disinclination to allow his vile little schemes into the comms subsystem meant that Soundwave was rarely privy to more than a general emotional impression from him. 

He now realised that he _truly_ had not appreciated that silence enough. 

Now he was stood in the middle of the command centre, trying quite hard to concentrate on the humans' nascent coding languages, positively flooded with what everybody else thought about Megatron's interfacing equipment. 

He knew now, that when it grew stiff with interest it grew and grew, plates unfolding in a long, soft-sounding, mesmerising tessellation, that the segments slid smoothly together, that lubricants seeped silkily out from between its nearly-invisible seams and shined on its satiny surfaces. He knew the tip of it was tapered and rounded, and that several people were _really_ interested in both the spike's curve and the node-heavy head of it, which was presumed across at least three minds to create connection and a strong circuit with a receptive ceiling node. 

Someone was fantasising about Starscream trying to suck Megatron's spike, how he'd struggle when it was forced past his gag reflex. They were pretty sure that would feel good, on all those nodes right at the head of Megatron's spike. 

The spike in this imagination turned green, unexpectedly. Ah, Acid Storm. 

Soundwave stared harder at his screen. The coding made no sense. 

Starscream's attention seemed equally fixed on Megatron's spike, but it wasn't as easy to pick out specifics—and, not being subject to everybody else's thoughts and feelings, he was having a much easier time giving his report than Soundwave was with his coding. 

"The peninsula is absolutely _crawling_ with those, ugh, _flesh creatures_ ," he was saying. 

Humans. Yes. The planet supported a great many of them. It supported a great many other flesh creatures, too. Soundwave rather liked the elephants. 

“The metals they’re using in their mining projects are what’s interfering with our scans,” he said, swiping imaginary dust off the big tower vent on his shoulder. He took a step forward every few words, slowly and meanderingly, as though his steady approach was in some way… incidental. 

Soundwave was in the position to acknowledge that there was nobody in the command centre who thought it was incidental. 

The room was uncannily quiet with the efforts of so many mechanisms pretending as hard as possible that they were actually working, despite the soft collective sigh of their fans creaking higher and higher. The command centre was thick, not with noise, but with expectation. 

Soundwave could hear every step Starscream took, creeping coyly closer like he was in any way disguising his goal. 

Megatron was not oblivious. An awareness of hunger hung between them, like smoke in a room without vents. 

Soundwave had written a loop he did not need. Haltingly, he deleted it. His optics flickered on and off, and it took much longer to be sure of what he was removing than he expected. 

“Of course, I’ve taken the liberty of investigating and, in applying my not-inconsiderable intellect to the problem, I have some recalibration recommendations for our secondary scanners that will rectify the problem,” Starscream was saying. His voice, screechy when he was yelling—like he usually was—sounded scratchy and soft, like a cybermoth’s soft metal wings against a cockpit. Or against the inside of Soundwave’s processor. 

There was the sigh of metal on metal, _shhnng_ , and Soundwave knew without looking that Starscream’s fingers were on Megatron’s huge, armoured thighs. That he was leaning forward. 

That his dark and pretty face was unbearably smug, smiling up at Megatron, red light leaking from behind his optics, sharp little teeth bared. 

Acid Storm thought loudly about his own valve, all damp and humid, wetness beading up on the underside of its panel. It tickled. It was making him uncomfortable. 

_Primus forbid someone feel uncomfortable_ , Soundwave thought, uncharitably. It felt like he could feel him squirming in his head. 

Someone else was fixated, _maddeningly_ , on imagining the long slow stretch of Megatron’s spike, touching every node on its progress through his valve, dragging through the syrupy lubricant. 

“Those can wait,” said Megatron. His voice, too, was low and thick. 

Starscream didn’t answer in words: his field throbbed, slow, hot and avaricious. He made a low growling sound with his engine that came right out through his yawning vents. 

Starscream’s plating opened with a series of clicks and soft pneumatic hisses, reshaping, baring protoform. 

_I want to see his spark_ , someone thought, loud and incandescent with lust. 

Soundwave tilted his head like he could cause that thought to fall out the side vents, somehow. It didn’t work that way. 

He didn’t look back, but since everybody—sixteen mechanisms, all fixated, focused, determined not to miss a glimpse of Starscream’s swollen and slick valve (a stray thought, carelessly rerouted: _funny how it’s still so nice-looking_ —unexpected, functionist rubbish; as though a valve was accessory hardware, as though it might somehow degrade with use)—was paying so much attention, it hardly mattered. 

Soundwave could have colour-matched the exact shade of the flashy, tempting trail of bright red nodes that circled the inner lip of Starscream’s valve. 

He heard the creak when Starscream grasped the arm of the chair for leverage and swung himself up upon Megatron’s lap—and upon Megatron’s spike, which sank slowly and with a giddy, fuel-rushing bliss, deep into Starscream’s valve. 

Starscream moaned deliriously, and Soundwave would have known from that noise alone that he was perfectly aware of all the optics on them, even if he wasn’t broadcasting his murky satisfaction. 

Soundwave dropped his hands from the keyboard and held them still at his sides, clenched into fists, reeling with the sensory feedback of the many hungry watchers, hundreds of fleeting fantasies. 

Megatron groaned. His big hands clutched, scraping straight down Starscream’s cockpit. His black fingers left streaks of black on the glass, and likewise left streaks like wet fuel in Soundwave’s processor, with the soft noise of their scraping. 

“ _Anghh_ ,” Starscream moaned, luxuriously. There was a thick, sloppy noise. Megatron’s wordless awareness of pleasure lanced through Soundwave, sharp and fast. 

Soundwave grunted. His own spike flexed, locked tight in its housing and unable to extend, marinating in its own lubrications. He swayed. 

A shudder went through the room. Someone’s armour rattled. 

“You know you’re going to have to do some of the work yourself, like this,” Megatron said. There was an unbearably fond indulgence in his voice, only a little bit hidden in the thrum of his engines. 

Starscream laughed. His wings flashed— _look at them, so sharp, so angular, frag, frag,_ thought someone, almost certainly one of the other flight-frames, because they were all _fixated_ —and then he did, he must have, somewhere, commenced _doing the work himself_. 

Soundwave was swamped, flooded with the potent thoughts and appetites of the onlookers. 

The air seemed to tremble before him. He leaned forward, crushing the keys blindly. The sounds reverberated: _yes, yes, oh, yes!_ and _did you want my spike so badly, shameless thing?_ and heavy clanking, wet, sloppy sounds of lubricant, the protesting shriek of the chair. 

There was spark light, once, a blistering radiance that glanced off the walls, throwing their silhouettes huge and monstrous across the room, burning into optics and searing into processors—or else that was just the splintering of confused passions in Soundwave’s head. 

When it was over he leaned on the console heavily. His fans were buzzing. So were the others’. The room smelled of fluids, thick and raw with it. 

He heard Starscream laughing, thrilled, delighted; he sounded deranged, like a broken hinge. 

“Someone’s going to have to clean up your mess,” Megatron rumbled, “again!” But he, too, was satisfied: glowing, glutted on the spoils of his excesses. 

The ground trembled as he rose, Starscream lifted and clutched effortlessly against him. 

“Put me down,” Soundwave heard him demand, distantly, but his voice and his field were at odds, and his thoughts were blessedly indistinct yet, but jubilant. 

“Be quiet,” Megatron answered him. The command centre doors hissed closed at last. 

Still, the buzzing didn’t abate. There were still mechanisms on shift, each with a growing awareness of awkwardness. _Most_ with a growing awareness of their own fans, their own fluids, their own trapped and swollen protomesh, their interfacing equipment primed and throbbing with charge. 

_Is Soundwave okay_ , he heard someone think, unkindly, a stab of recognition and amusement. 

He straightened. 

“Acid Storm: quiet,” he said flatly, well before Acid Storm’s vocaliser even clicked on. 

Silence. Tension descended. The duty shift, one by embarrassed and awkward one, returned to their work. Thoughts still ran rapidly, like ink, like fuel, and clotted with hungry cravings. 

Before him, Soundwave’s code was a mess. 

So were his legs, streaked with his own fluids. 

Nevertheless. He went back to work. 

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked something about this fic, I would love to hear what in a comment if commenting is your jam. Otherwise, I hope you have a good afternoon.


End file.
